On the night of November 7, however, at the very moment when his army was concentrating for an advance against Longstreet, McClellan was ordered to hand over his command to General Burnside.  Lincoln had yielded to the insistence of McClellan’s political opponents, to the rancour of Stanton, and the jealousy of Halleck.  But in sacrificing the general who had saved the Union at Sharpsburg he sacrificed the lives of many thousands of his soldiers.  A darker day than even the Second Manassas was in store for the Army of the Potomac.  McClellan was not a general of the first order.  But he was the only officer in the United States who had experience of handling large masses of troops, and he was improving every day.  Stuart had taught him the use of cavalry, and Lee the value of the initiative.  He was by no means deficient in resolution, as his march with an army of recently defeated men against Lee in Maryland conclusively proves; and although he had never won a decisive victory, he possessed, to a degree which was never attained by any of his successors, the confidence and affection of his troops.  But deplorable as was the weakness which sanctioned his removal on the eve of a decisive manoeuvre, the blunder which put Burnside in his place was even more so.  The latter appears to have been the protege of a small political faction.  He had many good qualities.  He was a firm friend, modest, generous, and energetic.  But he was so far from being distinguished for military ability that in the Army of the Potomac it was very strongly questioned whether he was fit to command an army corps.  His conduct at Sharpsburg, where he had been entrusted with the attack on the Confederate right, had been the subject of the severest criticism, and by not a few of his colleagues he was considered directly responsible for the want of combination which had marred McClellan’s plan of attack.  More than once Mr. Lincoln infringed his own famous aphorism, “Never swap horses when crossing a stream,” but when he transferred the destinies of the Army of the Potomac from McClellan to Burnside he did more—­he selected the weakest of his team of generals to bear the burden.

At the same time that McClellan was superseded, General FitzJohn Porter, the gallant soldier of Gaines’ Mill and Malvern Hill, probably the best officer in the Army of the Potomac, was ordered to resign command of the Fifth Army Corps, and to appear before a court-martial on charges of incompetency and neglect of duty at the Second Manassas.  The fact that those charges were preferred by Pope, and that Porter had been allowed to retain his command through the campaign in Maryland, were hardly calculated to inspire the army with confidence in either the wisdom or the justice of its rulers; and it was the general opinion that his intimate friendship with McClellan had more to say to his trial than his alleged incompetency.

Burnside commenced his career by renouncing the enterprise which McClellan had contemplated.  Longstreet was left unmolested at Culpeper; and, in order to free the communications from Jackson, the Federal army was marched eastward along the Rappahannock to Falmouth, a new line of supply being established between that village and Aquia Creek, the port on the Potomac, six hours’ sail from Washington.